SERVICE AND SOLITUDE
by Emil R. Kopp
English 5a
October 31, 1947
It was one of those foggy gray, deathlike still mornings in Greenland. It was APO 858, on that second largest isle that most of us usually just see as a strange far-off place on a map. Just as, I remember, I used to think of it in my old geography back in school; never dreaming someday I’d be there playing my little part in one of the greatest and most important dramas this old world has ever seen.
The many months of training in the states, the long cold novelty voyage on the transport, the stop at Halifax and Newfoundland, all seem long ago and dim in my memory. Only the constant dread of a torpedoing, standing on the cold dark deck, staring at the mountainous rollers of the sea during the many alerts, and the deep rumbling and shaking of the depth charges from our corvettes stand out as actualities!
But it was all real for there I was and had been for eight long months in that land where time doesn’t begin nor end. Eight months of delayed mail, GI’s, Skimos, a few Danish male civilians, but never a white woman!
It was December ‘43, a few days before Christmas. I was to get an early start on my all day trip down the fjord. I was to go alone in my open Navy liberty type boat designated J-308 by the Army Transportation Corps. The fjord would be frozen solid in another week and this was to be my last trip by boat until the spring thaw. One Air Corps weather station, Narsak, fourteen miles distant; another Simiutak, and a Navy outpost Gamatron, both at the mouth of the fjord on the rocky coast of the Atlantic and about thirty-five miles beyond Narsak; all needed a few more supplies and rations for their Christmas dinners. Though a trip down those desolate wild fjords was always a sort of an adventure, I looked forward to it with a heavy heart. Bundled in layers of wool clothing and covered with a heavy alpaca parka didn’t keep one warm long standing at the tiller in an open boat getting the brunt of the icey knifelike winds that sweep up from the Atlantic and off the ice caps and swirl through those valleys of water!
I started the powerful diesel engine, rechecked again my list of supplies and fuel, made sure my ever important bilge pump was intact, cast off, went slowly around the dock and a sleeping freighter, passed smaller craft and out into the mile wide fjord.
The vibration and noise of the diesel is ever present and quite annoying to most of the passengers I usually carried but I had long ago ceased to notice it–it seemed to be quickly carried away by the wind.
The monotony of such a trip is broken by a constant alertness avoiding the thousands of small ice flows and the many icebergs that break off from the glaciers that inch into these fjords. Some of these bergs are huge mountains of snow, most are solid ice beaten by the wind into grotesque shapes like huge monsters and it’s quite a diversion comparing them with various animated things. Yet, all of the are objects of wonder and beauty, especially the deep beautifully colored blue ones. I’ve never once heard of an explanation for their color but they are like big blue gems; the color of turquoise. They are the hardest frozen of all, like steel, and a .30 Calibre rifle bullet does not penetrate them more than a few inches.
As you go down those waters the high jagged snow covered mountains are always there and seem to be pressing in from each side. However, one can’t deny their breath taking beauty with many of their lofty summits hidden in the clouds!
The thin clear air of the North gives one a false perception of distance, especially on the water, a mountain of berg that appears several miles distant may very well be twenty-five miles away. And, even though you may go along eight to ten knots an hour, you never seem to get anywhere. You set a certain distant berg as your next destination and it takes hours to reach it.
After an hour the fog suddenly lifted from the surface of the water and a bright blinding light reflected from the mountains, the water and the ice. The sun itself couldn’t be seen but its rays penetrated the haze.
Grade: A-
Teacher’s comments: Very well written. You leave your reader, however, with a sense of incompleteness. You had only started your trip when bingo–end of composition.
